


The Werewolf Machine

by SMJB



Series: Library of the Miskatonic University [1]
Category: Conan - Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian & Related Fandoms, Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24649378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMJB/pseuds/SMJB
Summary: Selected excerpts from the memoir of Dr. Dominic Vanderhoof, detailing his work with MK-Ultra on a recovered Nazi device known as the lycanthropy inducer and his speculation upon the principles on which it works.
Series: Library of the Miskatonic University [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1782181
Kudos: 3





	The Werewolf Machine

  
_Selected excerpts from_ The Werewolf Machine _, the memoir of Dr. Dominic Vanderhoof._ The Werewolf Machine _was published posthumously and largely deals with his time working for the government._  
  
Someday soon I shall place my Slott bottle in an arc furnace; thereafter, my remains are to be cremated, my ashes destroyed via supercritical water oxidation, and the resultant salts scattered to the winds. Only after these measures and some others which must remain secret are taken--in other words, only after I have done everything in my power to put myself beyond the ability of modern necromancy to recall, question, or punish--will this book be published, for I was involved in one of the darkest projects ever undertaken by MK-Ultra: I am professor Dominic Vanderhoof, formerly of Miskatonic University, and I turned countless people into lycanthropes.  
  
[...]  
  
Our minds naturally went to Burg Kirkel--it was on an axis with the probable center-point of the event, and more than that, it was a castle; when Nazis fuck with powers beyond their ken, they love to do it in castles. One would think that the history of such places would cause interference with whatever forces one is trying to connect to, but I suppose useless talismanic symbolism was worth the practical drawbacks to them--one can’t expect a whole lot of sense from people whose ideology is wholly irrational.  
  
[...]  
  
It was little wonder that these creatures had been dubbed “lycanthropes,” as their resemblance to the wolfman of Hollywood was quite uncanny; the fur, the fangs, the nails that taper to claws--and of course, the fact that they had once been human, hapless residents of what had once been Kirkel. And yet, somehow, they were far more disturbing than the wolfman could ever hope to be.  
  
It was the eyes, I think; no matter how good the makeup, at the end of the day the werewolf of Hollywood is still a man in a costume, still a human being--in the eyes I saw that day, there was nothing human.  
  
The image of these beast men squatting in the ruins of their former humanity, what had once been their houses and shops and other buildings, albeit without much in the way of disrepair as of yet, stirred an association in my mind, though at the time I couldn’t identify what it was. All I could tell was that there was a familiarity to this vista, as though I’d seen or read about it somewhere before. (And as it would turn out, I had read about this exact thing--but that realization would come much later.)  
  
[...]  
  
You may have heard that the results of certain Nazi expiriments have been of some use to science. These rumors are incorrect; the truth is that the Nazis did not conduct their experiments with anything that remotely resemble scientific rigor. The vast majority of the results they got were meaningless and none have been of any assistance to modern science--even during the infamous Operation Paperclip, we were interested in their engineering experience, their technical “know-how,” rather than any breakthroughs they’d made in the science of rocketry.  
  
The lycanthropy inducer was no exception. There were six or eight principles upon which it was “theorized”--if such a noble word can be applied to wild Nazi ass-grabbing--to work, according to the slovenly German handwriting in the papers we found, and rather than testing their hypotheses one by one with several different configurations the way a mentally _disciplined_ sociopath would, they threw it all together in one big machine to see if it did anything at all.  
  
Which, obviously, it had. To the test subjects, the researchers, and the town that sprawled westward of the castle, who had been recklessly endangered for no good reason even by Nazi standards. This thing had the potential to be a weapon unlike anything I’d ever imagined before--the only comparison I can make even now is to the atom bomb, and it’s arguably superior even to that, as it gets rid of the people but leaves the infrastructure intact--and the fools hadn’t any idea how they’d done it even if they hadn’t of killed themselves in the process.  
  
Such was not my problem (at the time), of course; I had been sent in to find the cause of this event, and it was readily apparent that I had done so….  
  
[...]  
  
I did not keep tabs on news of the lycanthropes after the war; I hadn’t heard of the setting up of the Schwartzvald Sanctuary or of the birth of the first second-generation lycanthropes…  
  
[...]  
  
I was approached in 1953, very shortly after the formation of MK-Ultra in the first place, for the simple reason that I was the only scientist to have studied the device in its original context or anything like detail…  
  
[...]  
  
The first test was a simple one; before we tried to figure out how the machine worked, we first needed to establish _that_ it worked. Being the only anomalous object in a town full of lycanthropes and being found with notes explicitly detailing Nazi attempts to induce lycanthropy in people was quite strong circumstantial evidence, naturally, but at the end of the day it was still just circumstantial evidence--we needed to see this thing in action for ourselves.  
  
And so we assembled the machine in the Arizona desert…  
  
[...]  
  
…[T]hree miles away, Davies observed the struggling test subject via telescope. His job was to turn on the machine and describe whatever happened; he ended up doing only one of these things. After five minutes of silence, I called him on the intercom.  
  
“Lieutenant?”  
  
There was no answer.  
  
I called Jackson. “Davies isn’t answering; cut power to the machine and send some men to check on him.”  
  
“Aye, sir.”  
  
They found Davies exactly where he was supposed to be, except comatose and feverish--exactly like the test subject. On top of being an obvious loss for the project, this was also confounding--there had been people closer to the device who had been perfectly fine, after all. But not, as it turned out, who had been looking at it…  
  
[...]  
  
The lycanthrope transformation takes three days, during which the body works feverishly--no pun intended--to alter itself. During this time, the brain is cooked within the skull, severely reducing the subject’s intelligence, damaging its memories, and altering its behavior. Nothing of the person remains; there is simply a beast where they once were.  
  
In those days, there had been some hope for a cure for those poor souls locked in the Schwartzvald Sanctuary, of reverting them to human form; I had sadly proven that even if such a thing was possible, there was no point to it--even if you could restore the body, the man or woman it once belonged to is long dead.  
  
I ran every test I could think of on Davies and the unnamed homeless man. There was no virus or bacterium or curse that was causing this, that I could detect. No foreign influences at work of any kind. And yet it was far too regular, far too neatly done to be cancerous; there was clear design here, be the designer nature or some intelligence. It was almost like I was watching a natural transformation, like a tadpole turning into a frog. It would be far from beyond the scope of the imaginable for some malevolent entity to have written this sort of thing into our DNA as some triggerable sequence at some point in the bowels of deep time, of course--but even then, one had to wonder why the forces of random mutation and natural selection had left it untouched. And whether natural or not, what _possible_ purpose could there be in it?  
  
My main job was to work on the device, of course, but surely I could do that better if I understood what lycanthropy _was_ …  
  
[...]  
  
At the end of this phase of experimentation, we knew the machine had a range, a crude radius, inside which anyone present would become a lycanthrope no matter what, and that if you saw, heard, or otherwise sensed what went on within that space you would also become a lycanthrope. Furthermore, recordings worked just as well as the genuine article. This was already useful--tape players were far cheaper, more portable, more innocuous, and consumed less energy than the machine--but we wanted more. We would work ceaselessly, tirelessly, and ultimately fruitlessly to create a version of either the device or the recording that could be screened for specific groups of people.  
  
You might be asking why we thought such a thing was possible. As to that, you have to understand that while Mr. Hitler’s example of the ideology’s logical conclusion drove the movement underground, eugenics never truly died--the people involved in the project still believed in degeneration, and that Black people were either less evolved or more devolved--or both--than Whites. With that mindset, it was only natural to believe that we could “turn down” the device to such a level where it would only affect the “lowest” amongst us--whom we naturally assumed to be the troublemakers, of course.  
  
[...]  
  
Legends of werewolves, were-bears, were-whatever-predators-are-the-biggest-and-scariest-in your-neck-of-the-woods are global and as old as dirt. But while there’s little to no evidence of the medieval werewolf, the solitary predator that hassles peasants and farmhands, there are older tales which are backed up by the findings of Pleistocene archeology--tales that one might have read in _Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Cultes des Goules, De Vermis Mysteriis, the Book of Eibon,_ or _the Necronomicon_ if one has access to such books. In the highly likely event that one doesn’t, however, there was a good deal of scholarly papers on the subject written in the thirties--albeit by men with agendas, who wholeheartedly believed in eugenics and were looking for proof of their theories. It’s little wonder, then, that when they read that the people of Atlantis and other places were transformed into beasts, they interpreted it as them devolving into apes.  
  
In those tales, as you might have guessed from the above, lycanthropy wasn’t an affliction of individuals but a plague that levels cities and civilizations--sound familiar? I’d found the inspiration for the Nazi experiments, it seemed (and indeed, what the doom of Kirkel had reminded me of all those years ago). More than once, whole nations at a time were said to be reduced to the level of beasts and a few generations later men begotten of those beasts would rise and beget new civilizations. Proponents of degeneration have long pointed to such examples as proof of their ideas, but it seemed that I had found the real culprit--and if these legends were true, it seemed we might see humans born of lycanthropes one day (which was confirmed in 1985, much to the shock of Schwartzvald Sanctuary staff).  
  
And if the condition wasn’t, intergenerationally speaking, permanent, it was now more plausible (in that it was no longer impossible) that the condition was “natural.” That the reason we couldn’t find ever find a curse or germ--anything that could possibly be telling our victims’ bodies to do this stuff to themselves--was that their own DNA was telling them to do it--that with certain promptings, humans just up and turn into beasts sometimes.  
  
But that just raised the question: Why?  
  
[...]  
  
When the time came to take out Martin Luthor King, Jr. it was done with a normal bullet from a normal gun held by a normal assassin, and destroying his legacy turned out to be as simple as watering him down to the point where White liberals could believe that he’d have patted them on the head for not being as racist as they could’ve been.  
  
We had made not one iota of progress towards the goal of making the device only affect Black people, or the criminally inclined, or the mentally or congenitally handicapped, or any other undesirables, and I doubted we ever would...  
  
[...]  
  
One day I was watching a bird hunt a lizard. They faced each other, neither moving. The bird lunged. The lizard ran. Not fast enough, though, for the bird had gotten it by the tail. And then the lizard left its tail behind, confusing the bird for long enough to get away.  
  
At that moment, I understood everything--all the Nazis had managed to do with the inducer was summon the likeness of some ancient psychivorous predator, and our bodies did the rest. I came up with my hypothesis right there on the spot, which would later become a theory when it was confirmed that lycanthropy was epigenetic in nature.  
  
It’s actually quite simple, once you remember that evolution doesn’t care about us, our desires, or our humanity--only our genes, and whatever ensures their survival. Indeed, if one has no regard for the values of humanity or the continuation of any given culture, only the bare survival of the species, one must admit that the solution evolution in our species came up with to the threat of psychivourous predation is rather inspired. Such predators have no interest in soulless beasts, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah, this is my explanation for the frankly absurd way human evolution is depicted by Robert E. Howard. "Slott Bottles" are the in-universe name for the titular objects of _Two Black Bottles_. The various tomes name-dropped herein ( _Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Cultes des Goules, De Vermis Mysteriis, the Book of Eibon,_ and _the Necronomicon_ ) appear in too many Mythos stories to list.


End file.
